Rick Perl­stein, yesterday:

Nearly every con­ser­v­a­tive has some ver­sion of this–some way of saying that if self-​identified con­ser­v­a­tives fail or fall short, it’s because they’re not “really” con­ser­v­a­tive. But the stan­dards of what is a “conservative” are sub­jec­tive, shift­ing, self-​contradictory, and always self-​serving. A con­ser­v­a­tive will always give him­self the out of saying “conservatism has never been tried.”

What always gets me about this defense is that it’s a page straight out of the old Marx­ist play­book. Crit­i­cize Marx for what the Soviet Union had wrought and you got a stan­dard answer: don’t mis­take “actually exist­ing Communism” for “true” Communism.

I sup­pose in gen­eral that this rhetor­i­cal ploy is one every utopian move­ment needs for that inevitable moment when his­tory refuses to coop­er­ate with the best-​laid plans of mice and men. (And don’t for a second doubt the utopian sub­text of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment.) As Perl­stein says,

This single blunt fact cannot be over­stated: here was the first chance in the modern era con­ser­v­a­tives have had to prove them­selves. And they failed. Imag­ine if some­how Leon Trot­sky had sur­vived and was restored to the lead­er­ship of the Krem­lin, after gen­er­a­tions of “Trotskyists” had built an entire cul­ture around the notion that if only they were in the Krem­lin, the rev­o­lu­tion would have suc­ceeded. But their reign proved to be shit from start to finish. The psy­chic wounds would be pro­found. The dis­ar­ray, mutual recrim­i­na­tion, con­fu­sion, anger, are only to be expected.

But Perlstein’s little thought exper­i­ment encour­ages the thought that there might be some­thing more direct (and less meta­phys­i­cal) than his­tor­i­cal irony at work in the con­ser­v­a­tive par­rot­ing of a cen­tral Marx­ist apolo­gia. The thought, for instance, that they actu­ally did learn it from Marxism.